


Life Goes On

by StrangerxImagines



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/F, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-13
Updated: 2020-04-13
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:20:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23637442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StrangerxImagines/pseuds/StrangerxImagines
Summary: The driver, who was perhaps a few years older than Billy had said three words to him and had kindly been silent thereafter once Billy had given him a reason as to why he was headed to a small Catholic Church in Orange County. “My mother is dead,” he’d said. “I’m going to her funeral.”Billy wasn’t notified by his mother’s family about her passing and crashes her funeral in Florida.(Not beta-d)
Relationships: Billy Hargrove/Steve Harrington
Comments: 2
Kudos: 25





	Life Goes On

The cab bustled along busy streets, two lanes filled with angry red faced drivers and heavy spanish music filling the hot acrid air. He rolled up his window after finishing his clove and leaned back against the warm seat and sighed as the driver, a very expressive young man, glanced back at him with sharp dark eyes and put the air on full blast. Billy was used to growing up in hot places, right before his junior year he’d lived in California but California warmth had nothing on the heat of the Florida sun with all of it’s humidity. 

The driver, who was perhaps a few years older than Billy had said three words to him and had kindly been silent thereafter once Billy had given him a reason as to why he was headed to a small Catholic Church in Orange County. My mother is dead, he’d said. I’m going to her funeral.

The cab was stalled and Billy noted that on either side of him was a gas station and a small strip mall, the gas station was buzzing with people but the strip mall parking lot looked surprisingly empty though if he peered over his shades and looked hard enough he might see some patrons in the shop that sold barbecue or in the shop directly to its right where, if the lettering on the doors was to be believed, sold the areas best Cuban sandwiches.

He let out a soft sigh and stared forward and thought about his mother, a ghost he hadn’t seen since he was seven who left in the middle of the night without even a note. His father had been angry and devastated by her departure but that hadn’t stopped him from being a violent sociopath and then it was Billy who took all the beatings in her place, simply because he looked like her. Now, he’s twenty seven years old and seeing his mother again but for the last time, his father having called him in an angry bout because her people-Billy’s people-had tried to keep Trish’s death a secret. The one good thing Neil had done was get Billy the appropriate information and now here he was just minutes away from the church to say goodbye.

It was a lot to take, he’d been living well on his own in Boston and hadn’t thought of his mother in years or anyone else in his family for that matter and here comes his father calling, somehow having Billy’s new number, and railing on about how Trish had died and how they hadn’t wanted to tell Billy because it would hurt him too much.

Leaving you behind hurt her pride and reputation too much, I think. His father had said and Billy had agreed. He’d given off the number of the church and Billy had called about times and the location and then he was off with a poorly packed duffel bag on his way to Florida. The thing is Billy didn’t care that they had wanted to keep everything hush hush, Billy was practically a stranger to them by this point, he was just Trish’s boy, the one she’d abandoned. What bothered him was the fact that his mother had been sick for a long time and hadn’t thought to get in contact with him once. She had Neil’s information but she hadn’t asked for Billy’s and that...grated on him.

Half the reason he was attending was out of spite, an angry churning deep inside of him that seemed worse than tha anger he carried for his old man. Neil was a bastard, a rotten good for nothing man that could have abandoned Billy but never did, an abusive son of a bitch who hit more than he soothed but he worked his ass off and paid for Billy to go to college and for his first apartment so that Billy only had to worry about studying. 

Trish had done nothing, she called his father, after a few years, to see how Billy was doing but seemed too ashamed in what she did to ever want to talk to him and so that was their relationship and now she was dead. The hatchet could have been buried but she never tried and the only time he’d called her, after taking the number from the notepad in his fathers nightstand, she heard him say hello and she had hung up the phone.

The congested two roads begin to give way and the car moves sedately forward in inciments before picking up speed, closer to their destination and Billy feels his palms grow clammy but he blames it on the heat that still seemed to seep through the glass and make the inner cab somewhat clammy. They pass a large building, a school on the left and two neighborhoods on the right, a small turning road, not paved with cement but paved flat by all of the cars that turned down into the woods and finally they reached a the church, a large and wide gray white building with a tower so tall it seemed to kiss the clouds rolling overhead. 

“We’re here.” The cabby says and is out of the drivers side, the keys still in the ignition, the car idling at what seemed to be a side entrance, Billy didn’t notice much of anything apart from the statue of the Virgin Marry, her faced carved serenely, her hands out and up as though to take the hands of anyone who might need theirs held for comfort. 

He pays the driver and watches as the yellow cab pulls off and away and Billy, saying to hell with it and making an apology to God and the Virgin Mary, lights up a clove trying to settle his nerves. Church was something he was and had always been familiar with even if he hadn’t been since his mother left him. He remembers Sunday school and mass, easters spent scavenging for little eggs and doughnuts and juice-coffee for the adults, after proceedings had ended and while he knows that he should feel comforted he doesn’t feel that way at all. His mother is dead and he cares more than he thought he ever would after so many years and now, smoking in front of the Virgin Mary he feels that temptation, to climb up to the statue and put his hands in hers and pray to feel some sort of relief.

* * *

They dont notice him when he enters and it occurs to him that this is why the cabby had dropped him at the side entrance, he can hide better in the back watching aunts and uncles and friends of the family all together without being bombarded by them so quickly. He doesn’t recognize any of them, watches them dressed in a sea of colors, the elder people in pristine black or charcoal gray suits and dresses with their wicker fans and then the younger, aunts in pale blues and greens, teenagers in sharp brightly colored blouses and cardigans and black jeans as though that was appropriate enough.

Most were blonde with curls, some had red hair and then there was the very small minority of brunettes, if he looked closely without catching too much attention he would see brown or green or blue eyes, none like his mothers eyes which had been slate gray, and there were freckles on just about everyone he payed any bit of attention to. He stood in the very back when the proceedings began, prayed with the priest and his family during the small mass, listened raptly as his mothers relatives that came up to speak about Trish and all that she accomplished and then...and then his sisters, three in total that he’d never known about, all older than Billy and his blood pressure began to rise.

Because Trish had come back to them after abandoning them, it sounded like, had come back to their family and their father and forgot all else. She lived the good life of a devoted wife of a man she divorced young only to find and marry again, had been a good mother to the three daughters she abandoned for eight years before her return and had been a devout Catholic who gave back to her community.

It made him sick, the revoltion so immediate that he thought that he might actually vomit. He settled for leaving back the way that he had come as silently as he could, with his need for another smoke, after a reveal like that he doubted that the Virgin would much mind if he smoked in her company and hell, he might just grasp her hands and pray, needed the comfort and love even just a bit.

* * *

Sidaa Lee Armstrong-Wallaby is short with thick curls, brown eyes, glasses and a sweet smile. She is his eldest sister, aged 33.

Shelby Marie Landry-Wallaby is tall at five foot nin with long curly blond hair, bright brown eyes and a long mouth. She is his second eldest sister, aged 31.

Savanna Gene Wallaby, unmarried is Billy’s height, plump with teased to hell curls, buxom, loud and freckled. She’s the last of Billy’s elder sisters, aged 29.

He finds out all of this not because they had found him at the funeral or had accosted the handsome yet familiar stranger there or had caught him smoking and had come to reprimand him and then found out his identity. No, the information came from an impossibly handsome friend of the family who recognized him upon sight and had looked at Billy like he had seen a ghost.

Prichard Wright, his mother’s old boyfriend turned Doctor was a tall and handsome man in his late fifties with salt and pepper hair and a sharp jawline, he looked young for his age too, fit in the way a man was when they lived in the gym, his body clearly fit under his impressive dove gray three piece suit. 

“William Mason Hargrove as I live and breathe.” He’d said, cigarette in his own mouth unlit. “Its been twenty years.”

They made pleasantries, Prichard asking about Billy’s life how he’d been doing, if he’d gone to college, his career. He asked about Neil and Billy told him, three years after Trish picked up and left Neil remarried a woman with a daughter and that they were relatively happy living in Indiana.

“Good for him.” Prichard said. “Now Billy, and don’t take this wrong, but what are you doing here?”

“She was my mother,” He answers through a cloud of smoke. “I didn’t think I needed an invitation.”

“No I suppose not.”

He asks about Trish’s daughters and thats where he learns their names, two married, one not. The one unmarried with three kids, the other two with no kids. They were all sweet, Prichard said, good girls from good homes.

“And here I come ruining it, is that right?” Billy asks a bit amused. He figured that if he wasn’t asked to come that they might have all known Neil’s character as a good for nothing and maybe attributed Billy as a good for nothing too. 

If only they knew that the worst of Billy was not bad at all, oh maybe to the religious old timers inside but most of the younger generation might not give a damn about a queer faggot in their ranks, or so Neil liked to call him from time to time when he remembered that Billy lived with and loved a man back home.

He laughed much to the confusion of Prichard.

“So who sent you out here?” Billy asks extinguishing his cigarette and tucking the dead butt into the pocket of his slacks to be disposed of later. “One of the sisters? One of the old ones in there who recognized me too or....wait was it the husband?”

Billy had only seen the back of the husband’s pale pink bald head glimmering under the light as he leaned into the coffin to press kisses against Billy’s mother’s cheek. If Billy were Mister Wallaby he might have wanted to get rid of the unwanted child too. Just to save face at a time like this.

“Chet’s a good man,” Prichard starts. “He didn’t want me throwing you out, no, that mans a saint. He wanted me to invite you in, closer to the family.”

“You cannot be serious.”

“I am,” Prichard said. “Chet wasn’t too sure who you were, there was an inkling and well I was the only one who ever met you when you were young, I would be the only one in there to know for sure. He said if it was Trish’s boy to bring him up to meet his family and to say goodbye to his mama.”

“He said that?” There was a warmth in Billy’s chest that spread to his face and then his hands. “Really?”

Billy would have understood annoyance and anger at his appearance, an unwanted spectator that was best tossed aside and forgotten, thats how he’d been treated most of his life, but to hear genuine kindness, someone wanted him there.

“Yeah, shoot, yeah. I’ll come back in.”


End file.
